The Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association wants to extend its current “One-in-Six” rule (five Canadians for every foreign student on a team) to include curling. Because that’s what Canadians need protecting from — alien skips, says Cathal Kelly.

There is a hierarchy to athletic protectionism — from pointless to malign.

Whatever its good intentions, it always emerges from a failure of imagination and always results in decline. Whenever you draw an artificial boundary around any creative field — and sport is one of those — you are casting a vote for in-breeding.

The Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association wants to extend its current “One-in-Six” rule (for every foreign student on a given team, there must be five Canadians) to include badminton, golf and curling.

This is a very simple case of discrimination. When you pay your fees — and foreign students pay substantially more than natives — they entitle you to equal access to school-related extracurriculars.

Like the most pernicious sorts of exclusion, this one comes wrapped in high ideals. The purpose of the rule, according to the CCAA, is to give Canadian athletes an opportunity to excel. Left unsaid is the fact that they do so within a competition bubble. Canada: Happy to take your money; Unhappy to share the ball.

The CCAA is left pointing at the CFL and its Can-Con rules. Thus, they are leaning hard on that bad schoolyard excuse — “But I wasn’t the only one doing it.”

All of these associations have something in common — they are, either literally or figuratively, the minor leagues.

Big leagues do not limit access. They don’t care where you are from. They care about how well you play. Which is why they are big leagues — people understand they are watching the very best, as opposed to the very best from amongst the eligible.

Amongst colleges and universities, the practice of closing the door to certain competitors is unsupportable. What could be the justification? That it improves the overall quality of Canadian participants? Let’s say it does (though it doesn’t).

What is the purpose of those superior athletes? To win college championships? That has nothing to do with post-secondary athletics — we leave that idea to Americans. See where it’s gotten them.

Winning is great. It shouldn’t be the goal of publicly funded institutions. It’s a corollary to the real purpose of playing a college sport — learning to stretch yourself.

It might be (and has been) argued that stronger post-secondary programs lead to stronger Canadian senior national teams and better international competitors. That’s a dodge. The best Canadian student-athletes go south, and always will. The ones who stay do so because we have constructed a program that competes with the world’s best, not because they are guaranteed a spot. The best who stay don’t need an artificial boost up to the bare minimum.

All but two men who represented Canada at the last world basketball championship went to school in the NCAA. An irony. We disdain the skewed moral arrow of American universities, and are in turn the beneficiaries of their disdain for quotas.

It’s a more fraught issue when it comes to professional sports. The mission there is to win. Leagues ought to be able to arrange rosters in a way that promotes that goal.

But do quotas have any effect? The CFL has for years been carving out a space for Canadian footballers, knowing that few will make a real difference to their teams. The ones who do will spend their careers looking hopefully toward the NFL.

Similarly, MLS has constructed a closed system, yet bases its success on the marketing of a few high-quality foreigners. Aspiring Canadians and Americans are headed toward Europe. With the odd exception, it’s only when they’re in decline that they return.

Whether its economics or soccer, we crave open play and equal opportunity. The best are pulled magnetically toward it — a virtuous circle that turns the most welcoming leagues into the top ones.

The CHL is considering dismantling that advantage. Their potential workaround is a fig leaf taped over an uncomfortable reality — the Russians and Czechs excelling at the junior hockey level play because they’re better. Pushing 20 promising Canadian goalies into the starter’s job does not — Presto! — magically create one Brodeur. The only guarantee of quality is skill, and until you can gene-modify athletes, that’s an accident of birth.

At every level, closing doors on anyone limits the ambition to those who squeak through. It is a recipe for entropy and a failure of vision. It is hoping to stay small and survive, rather than risk everything in trying to be big.

At its very root, it is against the most basic principles that draw us to sport in the first place.

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